Chichester College

“The benefits of using a tool such as 360 are clear. It gave our managers clear and objective feedback, allowing them to see their strengths & limitations.”

Chichester College has 15,000 full and part time students based on two main campuses in Chichester, West Sussex and Brinsbury near Pulborough, as well as local training centres and nurseries. The College caters for a range of students – those who are just leaving school, continuing to a higher level, returning to education or who just want to learn purely for fun.

Students come from more than 100 countries and the College has won the British Council Beacon Awards for excellence in support for international students and international marketing, as well as a prestigious Queen's Anniversary Prize in 2005 for its work with international students. The College has extensive facilities including restaurants, hair and beauty salons, childcare and nurseries, language laboratories, recording studios, workshops, study centres and sports facilities (climbing wall, gym and all-weather sports pitch).

The challenge

Karen Williams, Human Resources Officer at Chichester College comments, "as a college we are committed to providing outstanding levels of further education."

Our staff, as well as our managers, need to be developed to their full potential. Our managers play a vital role in ensuring the college provides a second-to-none education.

Chichester College runs management development centres for its managers that are comprised of presentations and group work. However, they wanted to delve a little deeper than this to really understand what their managers were like on a day-to-day basis in the jobs that they did.

The solution

The college used Thomas 360 as part of its Management Development Programme. Thomas 360 is a competency-based questionnaire that gives objective and honest feedback from peers, managers and team members on behaviours that are critical to an individual's role within the business.

As a college we are committed to providing outstanding levels of further education. In order to deliver this, our staff, as well as our managers, need to be developed to their full potential.

It identifies areas of strength and where improvement would help compensate for their limitations. The feedback is anonymous and enables individuals to understand how others perceive them.

The results

"It gave them an overview of their behaviour so that they could see what they needed to change or work on, be it organisational skills or time management."

We want our managers to be the best they can be so that they are able to create an outstanding learning environment for staff and students. Thomas 360 gave us a holistic view of the person which formed the cornerstone of their development plan.

"We found the free text part of the questionnaire particularly useful in that it was an opportunity for respondents to be more specific about their comments. Specific examples really helped in the feedback process because it gave depth to the report."